The Big Bike Ride, New Zealand's North Island

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We set off to New Zealand’s North Island complete with our luggage in panniers prepped for our 10 day cycling trip. We landed in Auckland on Saturday 3^rdof March and by the time we got to our backpacker’s accommodation, it was pretty late and we needed to be up at 05:30 to take collection of our bikes. Our room was quite clean and tidy for a backpackers the only problem was the proximity to the nightclub, directly below!

Our bikes were delivered on time so we loaded up and rode to Auckland harbour where our ferry would take us over to the Coromandel Town, a 2 hour trip. The sun was out and it was about 23 degrees, perfect really. Day one, Coromandel to Hahei was around 60km and the very first 3km were up hill. It was the biggest and steepest hill (400m) of the entire trip.....fresh off the boat it wasn’t what we were expecting, but we were rewarded with the view at the top of the hill. With all the commotion of the primary hill climb I forgot to put the sun screen and ended up burned from the tee-shirt down, not a good look! All in all the first leg took 4 hours 10 minutes in the saddle. Hahei is on the east coast of the North Island, still on the Coromandel peninsular and it has some good coastal marine parks such as Gemstone Beach where we went snorkelling prior to setting of on leg 2. We saw a S.African couple that told us the water was fine......the water was so cold it gave us brain freeze. They did have wetsuits on and us with no wet suits we could only manage 20 minutes looking around the kelp fields and checking out the snapper.

Leg 2 was Hahei to Whangamata was a 70km stretch of mostly coastal terrain. 30km down and it was difficult getting comfortable on the saddle, Nat had stopped to put on her second pair of padded shorts. It was a long day and we finally rode into Whangamata as it was getting dusky, our campsite on the other hand was a further 5km into tomorrows ride. It was a long incline until we saw the sign for the campsite 300m....it was a relief. When we got there the 300m was to turn off the highway, we were then greeted by another sign of 5km to wentworth falls camp site but this time it was off road...... Nightmare, this was pure pain! A quick shower and BBQ dinner ensued and it was well dark by the time we had got into the tent after another exhausting day, so the dirty dishes were left in a bag until daytime.

Nat woke me in the night, “someone is trying to steal the bikes, I just heard them fart and they have knocked the pans”. Then I heard another lengthy fart as I was getting up but on looking outside there was no one there...until I looked up the tree to find 2 pairs of eyes squinting in the torch light. We were getting robbed by 2 possums with flatulence problems so I had to wash the pots in the dark, under a cold tap and the soup was literally welded on to the pan bottom!

Leg 3 should have been Whangamata to Tauranga and 78km, but as the stretch was un-documented in our cycling book we headed to the gold mining town of Waihi. This was a relative breeze at only 30km which we polished off well before lunch. The museum and the live gold mine was pretty impressive, we didn’t find any gold but we learned where we should look if we wanted a better chance. We booked onto a bus to Tauranga later that afternoon and we both slept most of the way with the bikes stashed firmly underneath.

Tauranga nestles firmly on the coast of the Bay of Plenty is a stone’s throw from Mt Maunganui, an extinct volcano that juts out into the sea. Apparently the walk around it is very nice but I think I can confirm that the fish and chips are better! Another bus was booked to get to Rotorua the following morning as the roads were unsuitable for riding, or so our trusty book told us.

Rotorua is the geo-thermal capital of the Southern Hemisphere, think Iceland on a smaller scale. The place stinks of eggs due to the amount of sulphuric hot springs in the area. The road in some places is so hot you can feel it through your shoes, some people even have hot pools in their garden and they pipe the hot water around the house for heating. It’s so hot a few feet underground that you can cook a whole cow (apparently, so a bloke told us) in three hours. We booked onto a white water rafting tour which took up most of the morning. We went down a waterfall with a 7 metre drop, the biggest commercially available in the world. We jumped in for a bit of a swim in a calm section of water and it was surprisingly warm. The white water rafting experience was good but not all that I thought it would be, we just bounced down the river mostly and we did not really need to do much paddling.

Many Maori tribes settled around Rotorua in the years gone by, which means there’s plenty of opportunities for a Maori Cultural Experience. We went to one mainly because there was a massive Hangi feast included that’s cooked in the ground and is all you can eat. Chicken, lamb, sweet pots, rosters, gravy and even garlic bread were on the menu. The cultural experience was also interesting....the Matai tribe were based around a sacred spring which flowed out of the mountain down into Lake Rotorua several kilometres away. The spring bubbles up into a small pond through the volcanic ground. The pond is so clear you can see the grains of volcanic dust ebbing and flowing with the fresh water coming into the pool. We first saw the pool in the day light and it had a crazy topaz blue hue to it whilst still clear. On the night after dinner we went down to see it again but this time there were glow worms all around the side of the pool like blue LED lights and a big Eel at the bottom.

Leg 4, Rotorua to Taupo in the heart of the Central Plain was 85km and had 2 sizeable climbs to contend with, one at either end of the ride. It was cloudy, cold and worst of all windy and smack in the face. Even the downhill stretches we struggled to break through 20km/h; it took 5 hours in the saddle and we ended up at the Taupo Youth Hostel’s garden in the tent as most places were full when we arrived. After a massive feast we hit the hay....well, roll mat. We had read the reviews raving about the Huka Falls on the Waikato River so we decided to check it out. The river flows north from Lake Taupo but is squeezed through a 10 metre wide chasm where the flow accelerates and erupts over the Huka Falls into the pool below. We took a jet boat tour up and down the river and we ended up next to the waterfall in the pool below, which was an unnerving experience especially when we were doing 360 degree turns in the white water. Me and Nat were sat plumb at the front and ended up slightly damp. We took the Huka Falls walkway back to our accommodation in the knowledge that it would lead us past a hot spring inlet to the river. It was full of school aged kids, so I could not convince Nat to go for a dip so I left her on the bank for 10 minutes while I sampled the temperature. It turned out to be a lot hotter than it looked but a quick swim out into the river soon sorted that out.

Leg 5, Taupo to Turangi was undertaken in the afternoon following the Jet Boat ride and was a stretch at 50km. The ride flew past as the route followed the eastern edge of the lake, the wind was low and the sun was shining, perfect. Turangi apparently is the trout fishing capital of the world but we went there as it is the gateway to the Tongariro National Park, where Mount Doom (technical name Mt Ng) from Lord of The Rings was filmed, (I have not seen it so I can’t comment). The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is a 20km trek through the national park’s active volcano creators and it took us 6 hours solid to complete. At summit there were steaming craters, emerald sulphur pools and clear crater pools, the general landscape was defiantly Martian in appearance. We were quite lucky as the rains came that night and continued on until we got the bus back to Auckland at 01:30 the following morning.

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